California’s Riverside County Mails 5,000 Duplicate Ballots; Registrar Promises Won’t Count

The registrar of Riverside County, California, announced Monday that 5,000 duplicate ballots had been sent by mail — but that none of them would count if voters tried to vote twice.

In a statement, Riverside County Registrar of Voters Rebecca Spencer apologized:

Approximately 5,000 duplicate ballots were erroneously mailed to some voters in Riverside County. A computer system error mistakenly generated duplicate mailing files for 5,000 voters. The computer system error was identified over the weekend, however, the ballot packets were already delivered to the U.S. Postal Service.

“It is important to note that none of the duplicate ballots will result in a voter being able to cast more than one ballot,” said Registrar of Voters Rebecca Spencer. “I take election integrity seriously and apologize for the inconvenience.”

Each vote-by-mail envelope has a bar code. When the bar code is scanned as accepted at the Registrar of Voters office it automatically locks the voter’s record so that the voter can only vote once. If a voter who received two ballots returned both ballots, only one ballot would count. The first ballot received would be processed and the second ballot would be automatically voided.

The county said voters who received a second ballot should destroy it, and submit only one ballot before Election Day, November 8.

Prior to 2,000, voters in California who wished to vote by mail would have to request to do so. During the pandemic, the state began sending vote-by-mail ballots automatically to all voters on the rolls. As a result, some people reported receiving ballots for people who no longer lived at the address recorded on the rolls, or for people who had already died.

Voters are required to sign their ballot envelopes when voting by mail; signatures are compared to those on the voter rolls, but “[e]xact matches are not required” by law.

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. His recent book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.

Photo: file